The fact that teams are increasingly working together regardless of location, i.e. remotely, presents companies with new challenges. Good cooperation and high motivation remain important even in an increasingly virtual work organisation.
Team building strengthens soft skills and cohesion in the group. Studies show that companies that regularly offer their employees team building activities increase satisfaction and productivity and improve the working atmosphere.
Physical encounters and face-to-face conversations between colleagues are often neglected in mobile working. Here are four ideas for digital team building:
1. Virtual sightseeing
One of the great advantages of video conferencing is that you can get a real-time view of a foreign city or landscape without having to leave your home office.
If you live in Berlin and a colleague from New Zealand joins your meeting, you'll want to take a look-out his window. Is it a spectacular view of the Lord of the Rings-style Shire, or an ordinary Wellington street? Being able to play tourist for a few minutes is fun for everyone and helps the team develop a shared perspective.
2. Remote quiz
A remote quiz doesn't require a lot of preparation and can usually be done without any additional tools. All that is needed is a questionnaire (there are more than enough of these on the net). Of course, the quizmaster must not be missing: He or she asks the questions to smaller strategy groups, which in turn receive one point for each correctly answered question. Whoever answers the most questions at the end and thus achieves the highest score wins the remote quiz.
3. Home office tour
To make colleagues more than names and long chat histories, a short video tour of the home offices is a good idea. This helps with online team building because colleagues get a more concrete picture of their digital counterparts and may even discover a new side to them. Knowing where the other team members are all day and how they work automatically makes collaboration more personal.
4. Presentation without a plan
Who doesn't remember the bumpy short presentations from their school days, where it was mostly a matter of deciphering the illegible transcripts of classmates and presenting them as authentically as possible? The game "Presentation without a plan" promises a similar experience. Before your video meeting, you should divide into small teams and create a PowerPoint presentation of about 10 pages on a topic of your choice (tip: choose something funny).
On the day of the virtual team meeting, you then exchange the presentations with each other so that each team has to pitch an unknown topic. The team with the most convincing or funniest presentation wins the competition.
